Courses

*[The] Lives of Lawyers (20357). 2 or 3 units. This seminar will employ oral histories of Yale Law School graduates, conducted by the seminar's participants, to explore the U.S. legal profession from the middle of the last century through the present day. The first half of the seminar will prepare students to conduct the oral histories. Several sessions will explore the institutional and economic structure of the legal profession and also its moral, political, and social purposes. A second group of sessions will explore oral history, both in theory and in practice. The practical materials will include instruction in "hands-on" interviewing, transcribing, and editing skills. The subjects for the oral histories will be YLS alumni, largely from a single class, recruited and chosen by the instructors. The oral histories that the class produces will be contributed to an archive being constructed and housed in the Yale Law Library. D.S. Markovits and N. Silber.

Credits To earn 2 units, students will be required to conduct interviews and submit an edited interview transcript and a brief contextualizing introduction. Additional credit is available to those who wish to complete Substantial or Supervised Analytic Writing papers that incorporate the interview into an interpretive and analytic essay.

Course Bidding: In addition to ranking this course among limited enrollment bids, students should submit a statement of interest that describes the student's main legal preoccupations and background in order to permit us intelligently to match students and subjects. The statements must be submitted by the close of the early registration period on June 26, 2014, at 4:30 p.m.

Note: Once students and subjects are matched, the course cannot be dropped.